May 1, 1851: All’s Fair in Love, War, Machinery and Appliances

A scene at the Great Exhibition. Image: William Simpson (lithographer), Ackermann & Co. (publisher), 1851, V&A/Wikimedia

1851: The Great Exhibition opens in London’s Hyde Park. It’s the birth of the world’s fair, a cosmopolitan tradition that has for a century and a half served as a trade show of sorts for human progress.

The brainchild of Prince Albert, the Great Exhibition was designed, first and foremost, to let the world know that Great Britain was doing pretty well for itself. A close second, though, was the idea of providing the world — which was emerging from the tumultuous Industrial Revolution (population growth, child labor, exploitation of workers, unbridled pollution, etc.) — hope for the future.

In just nine months, workers erected the exhibition’s home: a massive structure called the Crystal Palace. At 1,851 feet long and 456 feet wide at the center and 408 feet wide at the ends (covering about 18 acres), the three-story iron-and-glass building was essentially an enormous greenhouse, complete with fully grown indoor trees. Encased in 300,000 panes of glass, the building was dubbed a “glass-monster” by famed architect Augustus Pugin.

Running May 1 to Oct. 15, 1851, the Great Exhibition housed around 14,000 exhibitors visited by some 6 million people. Half of the building served to showcase all things British, and half was left to foreign nations. Interested in more efficiently dueling with rivals? Samuel Colt demonstrates the prototype of his famed 1851 Colt Navy revolver. Want something to start a duel over? Step right up to the Koh-i-Noor, at the time the world’s biggest diamond. Natural wonders not good enough for a modern sophisticate like you? Set your eyes upon what is surely the best-named product in history, the tempest prognosticator, in which bottled leeches predict the weather.

Prince Albert’s goal of hyping England most certainly worked, and the profit from frantic ticket sales wasn’t so bad either (£21 million adjusted for inflation, or $34 million).

But the exhibition was not without its critics. Karl Marx decried it as a brazen circus of capitalism’s commodity fetishism. Twentieth-century scholar Nikolaus Pevsner would later brand it “aesthetically distressing.”

It’d be hard to criticize where those profits went, however. England’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum wouldn’t exist without them.